Lost Son

Finding the family he left behind.

This happened on Interstate 78, in New Jersey, in November of 2003: While listening to a story on NPR’s “Morning Edition” about a National Guardsman who’d been killed in Iraq, I found myself in tears. At the time, I was driving from Manhattan to visit my younger daughter and her new baby, Tobias, who was then about three months old. Because my daughter’s husband had to be away from early morning until late in the evening on Tuesdays, I’d been going to New Jersey once a week to keep her company and do a bit of babysitting; we called the arrangement Tuesdays with Toby. The birth of a grandchild is an event that tends to push emotions toward the surface, and that may have been particularly true in my case. My wife had died in September of 2001. The delight I took in Toby’s arrival—and in the arrival of my older daughter’s baby, Isabelle Alice, who’d been born in the spring of 2002—was sometimes difficult to uncouple from the way I felt about my wife’s not having lived to enjoy her grandchildren. So you could say that my emotional defenses were not fully in place. Still, I was astonished that my response to a story about a young man I’d never heard of, a thirty-year-old helicopter pilot from northern Illinois named Brian Slavenas, was to weep.

First Lieutenant Slavenas, I was informed by the voice of Bob Edwards, had been in command of a Chinook helicopter that was brought down by a missile as it ferried soldiers on the first leg of their trip out of Iraq for leaves. Sixteen people were killed and twenty injured—one of the first big casualty reports in the period when Donald Rumsfeld was still saying that the continuing violence in Iraq was being caused by a few dead-enders. Brian Slavenas had been a member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois. “Morning Edition” ran a segment on him by Susan Stephens, of Station WNIJ, which is affiliated with Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb. He had been “physically huge,” Stephens reported—six feet five, two hundred and thirty pounds. But from her first couple of interviews, with a high-school buddy and with a teacher whom Brian had worked for during the summer as a furniture mover, it was apparent that he wasn’t the sort of big man who used his size to intimidate. The teacher, Lance Gackowski, talked about how, in pickup basketball games, Brian would cheerfully continue to concentrate on putting the ball in from under the basket while a couple of opposing players hung off him. The high-school buddy, John Rossi, said, “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Something else that Rossi said was not the sort of thing you’d expect to hear about a young man who’d just been described in terms of his size and strength: “We’d get into conversations and, say, if we couldn’t get a conclusion to something, the next day he’d go to the library or go on the Internet and look up the information and call back and go, ‘O.K., I figured out what we were trying to figure out.’ He just wanted to know.” His step-mother, Christi Slavenas, said something similar. Barely keeping her voice under control, she said that Brian was “very self-disciplined and studious and interested. He liked history. He liked reading, he liked talking to people about ideas.” Susan Stephens’s segment had lasted only two or three minutes, but it left a clear impression of Brian Slavenas: a powerful but good-natured young man with intellectual curiosity. He sounded like the sort of young man you’d want your son—or, yes, your grandson—to emulate. I don’t know whether it was that thought or the cracking of Christi Slavenas’s voice or John Rossi’s statement “He was the best friend you could have” that triggered my response, but for a moment or two I had to consider pulling off the road.

I have to get on the record something else that happened while I was listening to that segment from Illinois. I said—out loud, I think, even though I was the only person in the car—“What a waste!” From the start, I’d believed that the war in Iraq was unconnected to defending ourselves against terrorism, and I’d been particularly disturbed by the unfairness of who bore the burden of fighting it. Brian Slavenas sounded like someone who had gradually made his way through college by availing himself of the tuition help offered by the National Guard. I was angered that he had been sent to die by policymakers whose own sons were perfectly safe and who themselves, almost to a man, had evaded serving in Vietnam. By the time I reached my daughter’s house, I had more or less calmed down, but in the months that followed I never quite got Brian Slavenas out of my head.

I felt terrible about saying that his death had been a waste. Even though nobody in his family had been in the car to hear it, I felt that it had been disrespectful to them. I couldn’t make the case to myself that Brian had literally died defending his country—soon Rumsfeld himself began denying that he’d ever called Iraq an immediate threat to the United States—but I sometimes tried to see his death in ways that gave it some nobility. I told myself that it’s not the soldier’s place to choose the war or the battle. Defending the country requires a ready supply of young people who are willing to go where they’re sent and do their duty, even if, inevitably, there will be times when they’re sent to fight an ill-conceived battle or even an unnecessary war. Were the soldiers who stormed Gallipoli any less heroic or patriotic than the soldiers who stormed Iwo Jima?

I found myself hoping that Brian’s parents were true believers in the war in Iraq, so that, unlike me, they didn’t need to stretch to believe that he died defending his country. I thought I’d like to meet them someday. It’s possible that I just wanted to offer my condolences and tell them that their son sounded like a splendid young man. Or maybe I wanted to find out if the impression I had of Brian from that brief radio report was a true impression. I felt uneasy being so upset about the death of someone I knew so little about. Finally, a year after the Chinook went down, I decided to go to Illinois.

Before I left, I discovered that there had been a brief stir in the press a week or so after Brian Slavenas died. A few stories were written about whether the Chinook had been shot down because it was inadequately equipped, but most of the coverage was about his family. Brian’s father, Ronald Slavenas, a school social worker who was born in Lithuania and came to America as a teen-ager, had served in the 82nd Airborne Division between high school and college and had later joined the National Guard; in the days following his son’s death, he told one reporter, “This country took us in very generously. My philosophy is put your shoulder to the wheel.” A son from Ron Slavenas’s first marriage—Brian’s half brother, Eric, who is forty—had been in the invasion of Grenada as a forward observer with the 82nd Airborne. Brian’s older brother, Marcus, had been a marine in the Gulf War. Brian, like every other male in the family, had done a hitch in the military right out of high school—he was a paratrooper, based in Italy—and had later, for a time, served in the same Guard unit that his father was in. When reporters went to Ron Slavenas’s home, in Genoa, Illinois—where Brian had lived until third grade, when his parents got divorced—they found a large American flag and a wreath bearing the words “America’s All American Hero—We Will Never Forget You.”

But Brian’s mother told a different story. In the view of Rosemarie Dietz Slavenas, who’d just retired as an associate professor of early-childhood education at Northern Illinois, Brian never had any interest in being a hero and was under no illusions about the war in Iraq making the United States more secure. In fact, she said, he had tried to resign his commission rather than go to Iraq. Brian’s family on his mother’s side had, instead of a military tradition, a tradition of opposing wars. Rosemarie Slavenas had demonstrated against both of the wars her sons fought in; she is a longtime member of the DeKalb Interfaith Network for Peace and Justice, whose demonstrations tend toward silent vigils. Her older sister marched against the war in Vietnam. Their mother, now in her eighties, shares their views.

Brian’s father had taken it for granted that there would be a formal military funeral, but Brian’s designated next of kin—and thus the person entitled to make such a decision—was his mother. Rosemarie Slavenas said that it was her responsibility to give her son the funeral that was appropriate for his life. The service she arranged, at the Faith United Methodist Church, in Genoa, was a civilian service, with flowers rather than an American flag on the casket, and no weapons in sight. Afterward, addressing some reporters and cameramen gathered outside the church grounds, Rosemarie Slavenas said, “George Bush killed my son. I believe my son Brian died not for his country but because of our country’s lack of a coherent and civilized foreign policy.”

Eric Slavenas, a strong supporter of the war, had said that not having “Taps” and a flag-draped casket at Brian’s service amounted to “spikes in my dad’s and my heart.” Many of those who had attended the funeral at Faith United Methodist later walked over to the Genoa Veterans Home, a few blocks away, for a ceremony that included some of the military elements that Ron and Eric Slavenas had counted on—an honor guard and a memorial rifle volley and helicopters flying overhead in a “missing man” formation and a bagpipe playing “The Caissons Go Rolling Along” and a display of Brian’s military decorations. Marcus attended both ceremonies, but in interviews he’d argued that American soldiers shouldn’t have been sent to Iraq in the first place. (“All of them should have been back here dating girls and working jobs.”) On the Internet, the split in the Slavenas family generated considerable traffic, some of it ugly. One pro-war chat room had dozens of postings gathered under the heading “evil shrew loses hero son.”

So many people came to Brian’s funeral that the overflow had to be accommodated in the church basement. There were a number of military people attending in uniform, but there was no ceremonial military presence. The eulogies were about the civilian Brian Slavenas. From what was said at the funeral, it was obvious that Brian had an even broader spectrum of interests than I’d realized. He was a serious power-lifter, specializing in the bench press, but he was also a serious pianist, specializing in Chopin. He loved skiing, but he also loved chess. The friends who spoke said that despite Brian’s range of competence he was modest and self-effacing. He was, by all accounts, embarrassed by attention and quiet with people he didn’t know well. Jennifer Lasiowski, who had gone out with Brian for a year when they were at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in her eulogy that Brian was so shy it took him six dates to kiss her.

DeKalb County is a perfect rectangle of a county an hour or so west of Chicago. Parts of it—the patch north of Genoa, for instance—look like the sort of flat Illinois farmland that couldn’t have changed much in decades; the farmhouses resemble the picture that springs to my mind when I hear someone who’s from the rural Midwest talk about “the home place.” Genoa (pronounced Juh-no-ah) is a town of four thousand where the main street is called Main Street and the newspaper is delivered by a boy on a bicycle. To the south, though, an occasional subdivision sits on former cornfields; DeKalb, a city of forty thousand people about fifteen miles from Genoa, has not only subdivisions but a strip of box stores and franchises that would make an urban planner of any sensitivity weak at the knees.

Rosemarie Slavenas began teaching at Northern Illinois not long after her divorce, so, in the days before most of the box stores and franchises arrived, Brian grew up in DeKalb and made regular trips to Genoa to visit his father. Wrestling is the big sport at DeKalb High School, but Brian, who threw the discus for the track team and played the drums in the marching band, wasn’t a wrestler. For one thing, I was told by Lance Gackowski, who coaches wrestling among his other duties, Brian didn’t really fill out until he had almost finished high school. Also, in Gackowski’s experience, effective wrestlers tend to work off of some sort of anger. “Brian didn’t seem to have that,” Gackowski told me. “He was a very gentle person.”

That’s what I heard from Jennifer Lasiowski, a slim, direct young woman who works in a Head Start program, and that’s what I heard from Ed Rubeck, a grade-school pal of Brian’s who still moves furniture and looks like he doesn’t need much help with the pianos: Brian was a very gentle person. Even Ron Slavenas, in describing a son who had died in battle, spoke of Brian as “a gentle giant.” Rosemarie Slavenas has said that the last thing her son told her before shipping out was “Mom, I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

Among the people I talked to in Illinois, in fact, there was a remarkable consistency in how Brian was remembered. He was methodical, working slowly and patiently on whatever skill he was trying to acquire; at the gym used by the University of Illinois weight-lifting club, he didn’t miss workouts. His passion for flying was so strong that, even after his engineering degree was in hand, he didn’t completely rule out a career in aviation; for him, the practical appeal of the Guard had included not only tuition support but pilot training. He was the sort of student who studied hard preparing for an exam, was always pessimistic about how he had done, and almost invariably turned out to have done very well. He was thoughtful—someone who would always insist on taking the most cramped spot in the moving van. He had a modesty so profound that it sometimes seemed to shade into a shortage of self-confidence. His friends in the weight-lifting club didn’t learn until after his death about the trophies he’d won in out-of-town tournaments. When I asked Jennifer Lasiowski why she and Brian had eventually broken up—I don’t really know what made me think I had a right to ask that question—she said, “He thought I could do better.”

From the way she’d spoken of him, I suspected that she didn’t necessarily agree. Neither did I. Modesty may be particularly becoming in the person of someone who could win benchpress tournaments and play Chopin and fly a helicopter and co-write a thesis called “An Economic Analysis of Combination Vaccines.” I grew up one state away from where Brian Slavenas grew up, and, as I spoke to his friends and family about all he’d accomplished in his short life, I could almost hear him mumbling what I’ve always treasured as the Code of the Midwest—“No big deal.”

Brian’s brother Marcus struck me as an engaging young man, but he is also someone who, at thirty-four, might be described by a school social worker as still trying to find himself; when I met him, at his father’s house, Marcus was about to leave for Puerto Rico, where he hoped to acquire the credentials to become a scuba instructor in Belize. In the divided Slavenas family, from what I could gather, Brian, the last born, played the role often associated with the first child—the dutiful child who tries to please his parents and keep the peace, the child who doesn’t smoke or drink, the child who never gets into trouble. Rosemarie Slavenas sometimes refers to him as “my wise child.” In Iraq, he wrote both parents regularly—devoting most of his last letters to his mother to the care that should be given an ancient family dog named Pepper and mentioning in one letter to his father that he was considering staying in the military as a chopper pilot. Lance Gackowski thinks that the breadth of Brian’s interests, as well as his inclination to stay out of the limelight, had something to do with having parents who were divorced and held widely divergent views. “Some kids in that situation just shut down,” Gackowski told me. “He tried to fulfill both of their visions of what a noble man should be.”

Ron Slavenas, who retired last year, has spent a good deal of time travelling to military and community gatherings that honor his son. His house, whose front lawn is dominated by a pole that flies not only the American flag but the flag of the 82nd Airborne Division, has some elements of a military museum. Slavenas has on display the triangular box that was presented to him at the military ceremony, with a neatly folded American flag and his son’s medals. The walls hold, among other military mementos, a huge gold-star flag with Brian’s name on it and, across from a pencil drawing of a Chinook helicopter, framed copies of resolutions about Brian from dignitaries and legislative bodies. The centerpiece of that display is the letter sent to the survivors of every fallen soldier by the President of the United States.

Rosemarie Slavenas has been to a gold-star mothers’ event, but she’s more likely to commemorate Brian among people who oppose the war. In her house—in Rockford, where she moved in 2003 after she retired—the only indication that Brian was in the military is that his high-school graduation portrait, on the wall next to a similar portrait of Marcus, has his dog tags hanging from the frame. A large picture of an Indian in a canoe, a picture Brian painted when he was eight, hangs on the wall above an upright piano. The piano itself is a memento of Brian. In the two years that he attended Northern Illinois, before transferring to the Urbana-Champaign campus, she could tell when he got in at night because music would start wafting through the house—“Chopin that would break my heart.” Rosemarie Slavenas displays no framed resolutions or official letters of condolence. She is still waiting for an answer from her own letter to the President, a letter that said, in part, “My beloved son Brian died for your red herring in the sand. . . . He did not give his life. It was cruelly taken from him by your rush to war.”

Neither Ron nor Rosemarie Slavenas likes to dwell publicly on their differences over their son’s funeral, partly because they think it detracts from the memory of Brian. Maybe for the same reason, or maybe because the Midwestern instinct is to seek some common ground, I found myself looking for ways in which they are not as far apart in their views as they may at first appear. Rosemarie Slavenas, for instance, is not automatically hostile to the military. She told me that Brian did value the organization and discipline of the Army and that the Army taught him important skills. She liked the casualty liaison officer sent by the Illinois National Guard; at the funeral, he walked by her side, in his dress uniform and his beret, from the Faith United Methodist Church to the graveyard nearby.

In the Slavenas family, the one person who impressed me as a true believer in the war was not Ron Slavenas but Brian’s half brother, Eric, who operates a landscape-contracting service near Genoa. Eric, who says that he speed-reads a couple of hundred pages on current affairs every day, assured me that weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s links to September 11th have been found in Iraq but were suppressed by the liberal media. Ron Slavenas, despite the military displays, does not have Eric’s certainty. He’s a cordial man who seems to try hard to see other people’s point of view. Although he believes that the United States has to persevere in Iraq now that our troops are there, he has said that we went to war “a little too fast.” He told me that Brian, while being intent on doing his duty, was not “gung ho, not a muscle-flexing warrior.” Ron Slavenas wouldn’t say that his son tried to resign rather than go to Iraq, but he—and even Eric—would acknowledge that Brian went in to his commanding officer in order to “look at his options,” eventually learning that resignation after deployment is not permitted. To me, trying to resign and looking at your options sound like they could be different ways of saying the same thing.

Among the people I talked to—the Slavenas family, the friends who visited Brian at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, just before his unit shipped out to the Middle East—there is agreement that Brian would have been delighted if one of his options had been to stay in Illinois. After constantly shifting back and forth between college and the military, he’d finally received the degree he had sought for years; in Ron Slavenas’s words, “The world was just opening up for him.” On the other hand, there is agreement that, once it was clear that such an option didn’t exist, Brian would have done what was expected of him, as he always had. The way Brian went about things, John Rossi said to me, was “If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it full bore.”

“The single most important thing for me is to keep his spirit alive in my heart,” I was told by Rosemarie Slavenas, who in her letter to George Bush had described her son as “an honorable, restrained, talented, caring man.” I know that both of Brian’s parents believe that he lived a noble life. They’re left with differences in how he should be remembered. On my last day in Genoa, Ron Slavenas took me by Faith Methodist, where the funeral was held, and by the church cemetery, where Brian’s grave is still without a stone. What Ron Slavenas would like to see on the stone is something like “Brian Slavenas, 1972-2003, First Lieutenant, Illinois National Guard, Chinook Pilot, Operation Iraqi Freedom.” He assumes that his former wife would have different ideas, and so far he hasn’t broached the subject. It’s indicative of how different Rosemarie Slavenas’s ideas would be that when she heard of her son’s death she said, “All the kindness has gone out of the world.” If Brian had lived, I think he would have continued to please both of his parents. He wasn’t supposed to be frozen as one thing or the other at the age of thirty. He was supposed to live long enough to define himself rather than to be defined by his mother or his father. Parents aren’t supposed to have to decide on a headstone for their child. ♦

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